Czech foreign minister seeks EU action over sentencing of Russian historian

Foreign Minister Tomáš Petříček says he wants to work with his EU counterparts to support an amateur Russian historian sentenced to prison this week for allegedly sexually assaulting his adopted daughter.

Petříček is among those believe the changes against Yuri Dmitriev, an amateur historian, are bogus – part of a long-running effort by Russian authorities to silence people working to uncover uncomfortable historical truths.

“Historian Yuri Dmitriev exposed the crimes of Stalinism, found the mass graves of more than 6,000 people, including several Czechs who were executed after staged trials,” Petříček wrote on Twitter. “Now he, too, has been unjustly convicted. I want to negotiate with colleagues in the EU on how we can help him.”

In 1997, Dmitriev discovered a mass grave of people executed at the height of the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938. He also previously headed a branch of Memorial, one of Russia’s most prominent independent human rights groups.

In January, notable figures from across the globe addressed an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin asking that the historian's prosecution be stopped. Among the Czechs who signed it were former Czech Ombudsman Anna Šabatová.